Covid 19 Panic

[balkesekemi]

Hi Folks, Kemi here Today I went to a diagnostic center to check my blood sugar levels. I saw a suspect 10 feet away while walking, he was asking the security guard for Covid 19 testing area. I did not go closer or touch. I was wearing face mask I came home and washed everything and sanitised my self by taking a bath. I'm i at any risk of catching the virus? Does it trasmit through air?

I'm sure the suspect was wearing white clothed mask. Kindly help i'm breaking my head

[AnnieBrooke]

This article has info all in one place. It was already excerpted when I saw it; I assume that is what the elipses are.
________

(Excerpted from:)

"The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them" by Professor Erin Bromage, Comparative Immunologist and Professor of Biology (specializing in Immunology) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

The main sources for infection are home, workplace, public transport, social gatherings, and restaurants. This accounts for 90% of all transmission events. The biggest outbreaks have been in enclosed environments with poor air circulation and high density of people. These have included prisons, religious ceremonies, group-living situations, and workplaces such as meat-packing facilities and call centers. I regularly hear people worrying about grocery stores, bike rides, inconsiderate runners who are not wearing masks ... are these places of concern? [ ]

In order to get infected you need to get exposed to an infectious dose of the virus[.]
...
[You can get infected by:]

[Touching things in a b]athroom: Bathrooms have a lot of high-touch surfaces, door handles, faucets, stall doors. Transfer risk in this environment can be high. We ... do not know whether a person releases infectious material in feces or just fragmented virus, but we do know that toilet flushing aerosolizes many droplets. Treat public bathrooms with extra caution (surface and air), until more is known about the risk.

A cough: A single cough releases about 3,000 droplets, and droplets travel at 50 miles per hour. Most droplets are large, and fall quickly, but many stay in the air and can travel across a room in a few seconds.

A sneeze: A single sneeze releases about 30,000 droplets, with droplets traveling at up to 200 miles per hour. Most droplets are small and travel great distances (easily across a room). If a person is infected, the droplets in a single cough or sneeze may contain as many as 200,000,000 (two hundred million) virus particles, which can all be dispersed into the environment around them.

A breath: A single breath releases 50 - 5000 droplets. Most of these droplets are low velocity, and fall to the ground quickly. There are even fewer droplets released through nose-breathing.  Importantly, due to the lack of exhalation force with a breath, viral particles from the lower respiratory areas are not expelled.
...
All you have to do is enter a room within a few minutes of a cough/sneeze and take a few breaths and you have potentially received enough virus to establish an infection.
...
With general breathing of 20 copies [of the virus] per minute into the environment, even if every virus ended up in your lungs, you would need 1000 copies divided by 20 copies per minute:  50 minutes [of exposure].

Speaking increases the release of respiratory droplets about 10 fold; ~200 copies of virus per minute. Again, assuming every virus is inhaled, it would take ~5 minutes of speaking face-to-face to receive the required dose.

Anyone you spend greater than 10 minutes with in a face-to-face situation is potentially infectious [or could get infected by you].
...
It appears approximately 40% of all infections -- and the majority of community-acquired transmissions -- have occurred from people without symptoms (asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people). You can be shedding the virus into the environment for up to 5 days before symptoms begin.
...
Social-distancing rules are to protect you with brief exposures, or outdoor exposures. Social-distancing guidelines don't hold in indoor spaces where you spend a lot of time, as people on the opposite side of the room have gotten infected.

If you are in an open-floorplan office ... critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you should assess [whether the risk is worth it to you].
...
Even if gung-ho for resuming business as usual, do your part and wear a mask to reduce what you release into the environment.
...
Infected respiratory droplets land somewhere. Wash your hands often and stop touching your face.

[keveen21]

The only people who have most cause to fear it are those who have health problems and over 60 - if you check who has died by looking at the graphs. Most people are not going to die even if they get it. Most vulnerable are over 60s with co-morbidities, obese and people in Care Homes!  Plus it isn't going away until they have a vaccine. So we will all have to get used to the risk. Looks like it is going to be another flu. True it has killed some few people and they don't know why yet. More people die of Dementia and Cancer every single year, and heart disease.

[AnnieBrooke]

You said "Most people are not going to die even if they get it." Believe me, you don't want to get it. It's a miserable illness, and if a person gets it enough to be hospitalized, even if they don't die, it's likely they will come out with some long-term damage.

[Paxiled]

And you're wrong, wrong, wrong.  In a few months over 82,000 people have died of this monster in the US.  In the world, I think it's up to 250,000 dead, or near to that.  That's in a matter of months.  I have no idea how many people die of dementia, because people with dementia die of lots of things.  This is not a flu.  Older people with co-morbidity were more likely to die in the beginning, but we now know that young people are dying too.  Healthy people are suddenly dropping into severe illness and death.  Those people in the Nursing homes got it from their younger relatives and caregivers, who got it first.  Children can die of it.  Months after getting it you can still be sick.  Children are getting horrible shock symptoms despite having had very mild cases.  It's all well and good to talk in generalities, and you are probably right, we will have to get used to this if we don't get a vaccine and just watch the herd get culled.  We aren't going to hide at home forever, or even much longer, as people gotta eat.  But if you go by since November when the first cases were seen but not known yet as covid to now, look at those numbers.  Nothing kills that much.  In time, it might well become much less lethal in order to survive -- no virus can survive if it kills too many hosts -- but for right now, it is what it is and it is the most contagious and weird disease we've seen in our lifetimes.  There is no sense being paranoid about it, you're right, and again, I think you're right, we're just going to have to sacrifice a ton of people if there's no treatment or vaccine eventually, but for now, patience, let's see if we can't find those things before we just give up.  When you say the "only" people who have to fear it are old people with co-morbidities, that's just inaccurate.  And it's not just another flu, as if we want another flu.  Flu kills the very young and the very old.  This one can kill anyone, or if not, leave them very damaged for at least a time.  We can wait some more time to see if we can find a way to fight back.  But if we can't, then as I said, you're probably right, we'll just have to watch a million or two die of it until we get her immunity, assuming immunity is gotten -- we still don't know yet for certain if we do get immunity or how long it lasts if we do.  

[CurfewX]

I have friends with health problems.  I have MANY friends who are over 60, including my own parents.  Casually mentioning that it's "just those people" dying suggests that their lives are less valuable than others, and is, quite frankly, demeaning to those of us who fall into the at-risk category or have loved ones who do.  

Heart disease, dementia, and cancer are not contagious and cannot be prevented from spreading to others by taking standard infectious disease control measures.  Maybe instead of getting used to being at risk, and putting others at risk, we should try to get used to caring as much about others as we do ourselves.

(Also note the the R0 of COVID-19 is much higher than the flu, so it's not "just another flu.")

[Paxiled]

Meant herd immunity.

[Paxiled]

And just to add, and not just because I'm 67 although I have none of the co-morbidity factors, remember, a lot of younger people do have those co-morbidity factors.  I'm not sure obesity is one of them, but particularly in the US we have a very sick population.  We eat poorly, live a very stressful life not because we need to but because we impose it on ourselves, and allow ourselves to wallow in a pollution-filled world of tainted air, water, and food.  And we eat things that aren't food at all.  That means a lot of younger folks are also at higher risk.  African Americans are suffering disproportionately because of our history.  It's just a bad situation all around that shouldn't have been this bad here.  But keep in mind that in every society it's the older folks who have the most money because they spent a lifetime earning it, while the young haven't accumulated wealth yet.  While that doesn't include me, it does mean if you want the economy to get going again you need people who have money to buy the stuff that lets the younger folks earn it.  

[Paxiled]

I'm not sure that's true that the most contagious cases are those gasping for breath, asymptomatic people quite possibly are spreading it the most since nobody knows they are sick.  But that being said, let's look at this particular instance.  Both of you were wearing masks.  Masks actually aren't all that protective for you but they protect others from you, and he was wearing a mask and so were you.  Second, you were beyond the 6 feet we're recommended to social distance.  You don't say if you were outdoors or not, but it's much harder to get it outdoors so if you were that's another safety factor -- it spreads best in crowded indoor places where air circulation isn't all that great.  Outdoor air also pushes any droplets down rather than out.  He also doesn't appear to have been either facing you or coughing.  And most important, it takes a fairly intense encounter for most people to get it -- not a very brief one.  Don't add anxiety to the already bad situation with this virus if you can help it.  Peace.

[AnnieBrooke]

While it's true that some people with Covid-19 are asymptomatic, the load of virus a person is putting out is apparently a factor in how likely someone else is to catch the disease from them, and an asymptomatic person (if he had it) wearing a mask and walking and calmly asking the guard something will not be putting out near as much virus into the air as someone gasping and coughing. According to what I've read, it takes more than simply one random virus particle to get a person sick, our own body's defenses can apparently handle the random single particle.

[Paxiled]

That's true, but if someone is coughing and sneezing and gasping even before covid you probably weren't going to spend a lot of time near that person unless you live in the same house.  But if someone is asymptomatic, they don't appear to be a danger, and so they are the super-spreaders.  They move around, nobody avoids them, and it is long and intimate contact that produces the most severe cases.  Look at the recent case in South Korea, an asymptomatic guy goes bar hopping and the country is back with clusters of cases.  If he had been coughing and gasping nobody would have gotten anywhere near him.

[AlbertinaG]

As you told you were wearing a mask, you didn't touch him and you were standing 10 feet away. There are no chance of getting the virus.

[AnnieBrooke]

Being near someone who is heading for a Covid-19 test is more likely to mean nothing than something, because a lot of people who get tested don't wind up having Covid-19.

But even if the person you were suspicious of really did have Covid-19, you are still pretty safe. Here are some reasons:

- He was masked.
- You were not standing close to him.
- He was facing the security guard, not you, when he talked.
- Apparently he was not coughing.
- The most contagious cases are not those walking in and calmly asking the security guard where the testing is, they are those rushed in by ambulance gasping for breath.

It doesn't sound like you had any exposure.
Stay careful, try not to freak out.